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Teaplz had the blood orange pu-ehr from Samovar earlier and it inspired me. Since then there were a couple other citrus-y posts, so maybe we’ve got the Citrus Craze coming in? It’s been a while since we’ve had one of those flavour-trend days, hasn’t it? I just got a (regular) orange pu-ehr sample after all, and feeling optimistic due to the very successful pot of the lemon oolong, I thought why not continue on the citrus line?

The leaves look like a black tea. They’re small and well, black, and they smell largely of orange rind. Not much else, to be honest. On the other hand, it’s not a synthetic orange smell, so I’m not really sure whether or not to be worried here.

After steeping, though, I’m very pleased to say that my nose detected an absolutely delicious pu-ehr smell. Vaguely cow stable-ish. Not really how a cow stable actually smells, but more the memory of the way it smelled when you were very very little and visited your great-grandparents on their farm and your great-grandfather took you with him out to tend to the animals. I can’t actually remember him doing that, but I’m sure he must have, you know? And I associate the smell with that and with them. I sincerely doubt my great-grandparents would have liked this, and I don’t even know if they drank tea at all, but the smell reminds me of their house. I can remember what the kitchen looked like and the little pantry where my great-grandmother fed me jam with a spoon straight out of the glass (“because that was such a nice little mouth, it couldn’t hurt”) and I remember the low ceilling of the living room with my great-grandfather at the end of the table with his pipe and how you had to pass through the cold cold hallway at the back to get to the bathroom, how the garden looked like and the ‘nice’ livingroom which was ONLY used on special occasions. Anyway, that was a bit of a tangent into my earliest childhood memories there. My very first encounter wtih pu-ehr I didn’t like the smell very much , but now a couple of years later pu-ehr, to me, smells like these memories.

Let’s get back to the tea. The taste is very pu-ehr. Not so much orange. Mind you, it’s been so long since I’ve last had a proper plain pu-ehr (or any sort of plain pu-ehr, actually) that in the mmmmm pu-ehr!-ness of it, I’m completely missing out on the orange-ness. If I concentrate though, I can find it sort of at the end of the sip, and it’s going very well with a piece of chocolate. The pu-ehr itself is… I can’t really describe it. I can’t really tell you about tasting notes here at all because it’s just…. pu-ehr! It tastes like pu-ehr! Yummy, but just pu-ehr.

I’m enjoying this enormously, but unlike the lemon oolong, I’ll have to put some thought into whether or not it’s something I want to stock up on.